By Heck…this little blog of mine has been going five years…who would have thought that i could spout random guff for so long… but evidently I can.. I have spouted so much in fact that I now have to pay for it…

Anyway in those five years I have managed …

1806 posts …that’s quite a lot I think

Over 14,000 visitors with 43,200 views

With my best ever views in a single day being 137.

I would seem to have 203 followers, of which about a tenth engage with me and and probably not that many know what a model soldier is…upon saying this there are artists and even a couple of members of my family… Esther probably keeps an eye on me to see what I am sending my pocket money on :🤣😅🤣😅

My first post was a Flintloque one…actually my first one said so it begins… my first one with anything to look at can fe found below…

The first miniatures appeared

So after a stint of something like 960 daily posts, I have dropped right back… to once in a blue moon…I really must get back into the swing of things again…

Sorry no blog for a while, the title really says it all. I have just literally run out of steam.

I have plenty to be going on with. Part of me is waiting for a pile of tufts to arrive so that I can finish off the undead… I could add rust, but for some reason don’t want to… probably scared I balls things up to be honest.

I have 15mm Samurai and imperial stuff either undercoated or part finished sitting right next to the paint.

Hopefully a regular service will return shortly!

As I have done sod all I thought I would share my class WIP on the Great Wall.

You may, or may not have noticed that there was no blog last night. I had done no painting and was knackered so made the conscious decision not to write one on basically my day. It took a bit of willpower not to, but this morning I woke and there was no major guilt trip or worry that it might have exploded or something like that.

I though this was an appropriate track…The End another one would have been… Its the end of the blog as we know it (and I feel fine).

Up to yesterday I had done, a quite an impressive 920 day streak of daily blogs, some had more than one in and others had also my Shetland blog too. This mammoth undertaking started in 2019 when I decided I had missed a few weeks due to working in a busy school. It kind of became easier to blog than not, but when inhavent done anything to blog about, that is when I start to wonder why…

Am I stopping, Nope, not at all. Before my self imposed blog a day I was doing three to four posts week so there is still a fair old bit inside me.

In the next few weeks I want to get these Italian Wars miniatures finished, I think the destruction of the Pike blocks caused a bit of a slump in my enthusiasm. I have only three tercio shot and four units of skirmishers to finish. Hopefully without further destruction they should be done and dusted and put in a box never to see the light of day for a while… a bit like now really.

Well as you might know I do like a bit of online gaming, and indeed sometimes I do get a bit miffed as tactics seem to be something that  aren’t considered. I mean who drives a tank into a built up area without infantry support. Come to think of it an M8 armoured car survived three hits from my Tiger, so did various Shermans.

Secondly, I had a look on Facebook to see what gaming videos were there and I was a bit surprised to see scantily clad young ladies ‘playing’ games. One if them actually had a controller in her hand 🤣. I mean I am not a prude by any way or means. But it was a bit pathetic at the amount of blokes commenting and sending tips. I mean for the young lady in question she is making a fortune and as such is very enterprising. But do the blokes honestly think that they are in with a chance. In a way it was actually quite depressing watching fellow bloke make a complete arse of themselves.

Tonight I looked up and realised it was 11.30, so Jo painting this evening, but I thought I would pose a question… Why do we choose the periods that we do? What draws us to them?

I will start…well that was a bloody stupid thing to say! Unless you are psychic and answered me earlier … Doh!

Anyway some periods I play and why….

First off The French and Indian Wars, this was simply down to the book Last of the Mohican’s that I read as a kid and later on the film.

Colonial… films when I was a kid again… Zulu, Zulu Dawn, and the four feathers…I decided to game the Sudan due to the different troop types available.

WW2, basically that was the stuff I was bought as a child… ww2 20mm Airfix, I dont really play it anymore but still have my 6mm Wermacht forces, plus some Americans I was given by my mate.

Other’s in the past were Vietnam, mainly in part to the influx of films like Platoon etc and also the Magazine ‘Nam’. I really like the crusades and medieval gaming, but I think this comes from Cry Havoc and Outremer board games,not to forget Samurai Blades which probably got me into Samurai gaming. OthersI haven’t got a clue… like Aztec and Conquistadors… haven’t a clue. Some might have come from the clubs I was playing in, but that was so long ago I honestly cannot say.

So the question is, why do you choose to do what you do…

So after a number of weeks of whiteness everywhere we awoke to pretty much this this morning…

I think I prefer the snow, the winds are up to to about 60mph, gusting higher, and at least is rain rather than snow. A bit miffed I never got my Valhallan’s photographed in their natural environment. Unst has warned that its roads are remaining closed due to severe drifting snow.

Okay to be fair it is about 40 miles away as the crow flies from my house to the centre of the island and indeed, when we were first up here we went for a day out to Unst and turned around due to drifting snow, which by time we got back to the ferry had totally disappeared.

It will soon be spring, except we don’t really have a proper spring, it’s more like winter, a few days of sort of spring then Summer. On the up side it there is still light in the sky gone 17.00 now.

Hopefully I will get more painting done this afternoon.

As I said in yesterday’s post, we have been visited by large pods of orca. This is someone my wife knows who had a close encounter…

The boat is in the foreground of the picture.

So far this year we have had dolphins – pod of about 40 of them. Orca, humpback, Minke and also a Sperm whale.

We set the camera trap up near the stream and got some great rare birds. We caught a male teal as well as some grey wagtails. Not to forget the regular snipe, oyster catchers and mallards, including a pile of ducklings. We haven’t managed to catch the otter, but one of the Oyster catchers spend ages preening itself in front of the camera so we got loads of footage of him having a right good clean.